Challenges in Anthropology

Well, the students of anthropology national meeting was held last week at our faculty. The title of the meeting was: “Ruptures, experiences and projections”, so students from different points of the country met to know what has been done , what is been doing in all the different anthropology schools of Chile, in order to propose general perspectives about how us, as students of anthropology, believe the career should be project toward the next future.

In my opinion, the perspective of the students from others universities was really different from ours. I don’t want to comment their way of how to make anthropology, or compare it with the way from this university, because I think is not appropriate (at least not in this moment). I think one big challenge of the discipline is to generate an open and critical discussion among the different points of view of the anthropology, especially among different universities. In fact, studying Social Anthropology in Valdivia than in Santiago is complete different, not only because they are immersed in different realities, but also because there are differences in the academic program and methodological focus of each faculty.

I cannot tell about technological challenges of the discipline because I’m not familiar with the technical or technological display, like computational programs, used in anthropology.

One important challenge of the entire discipline, especially of social anthropology, is the little work demand from the society (maybe I should use the word market instead of society, but I’m not comfortable thinking that your job opportunities depends exclusively on the fluctuations of the economical market). A lot of students enrol the career thinking that they can make a real contribution to society studding anthropology, but when they face the “work world” they discover that maybe is not possible to do what they really want, because almost nobody gives money to do social researches, and if they do, is because there are some economical interest on it. In a similar way, in our country forensic anthropologist don’t get the enough acknowledgment from their work as a forensic scientist (a doctor) could get.

Is true that anthropology is quite a new discipline (at least in Chile), but I believe is time for the society to recognise this discipline can help to solve serious matters, like the Mapuche conflict, and several more.